Monday, April 23, 2012

If one can say that a
life can be transformed by reading a writer’s work, the contemporary Italian
writer Antonio Tabucchi (who died this March) provides a notable example. As a
student in Paris, Tabucchi read Fernando Pessoa’s poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” which
set him on a lifelong trajectory influenced to an unusual degree by the
Portuguese writer. Tabucchi wrote and
taught of Pessoa, translated nearly all of the writer’s works into Italian, and,
in his own novels and short stories, fed ravenously on Pessoa’s influence.

Before I leave off
discussion of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I thought I’d attempt to
summarize Tabucchi’s brief treatment of this work in La nostalgie du
possible: sur Pessoa (The Nostalgia of the Possible: On Pessoa), one
of Tabucchi’s two books of essays on the writer. There may be more insightful
works on Pessoa, but I’ve singled out this one due to my appreciation of Tabucchi and because the book is both unavailable in English and difficult to
track down in French. La
nostalgie du possible consists of four lectures Tabucchi presented in Paris
in 1994 along with a handy guide to Pessoa’s principal heteronyms, those alter
egos he created as authors of his poetry and prose. The first lecture addresses
philosophical concepts in the entirety of Pessoa’s work. Another compares
Pessoa to Leopardi. In a third (for me the highlight of the collection, though
not the subject of this post) Tabucchi literally unpacks – like Harpo Marx
emptying his pockets – the diverse and surprising belongings of the Pessoan
heteronym Alvaro de Campos, commencing with a list of all the physical objects
mentioned in de Campos’ poems, and incorporating a wonderful bit about the
automobile in modernist literature that begins with Proust’s “Ruskinian
adventures” in visiting France’s cathedrals using a car’s headlights to
illuminate their facades and ends with discussion of a wayward tire floating in
the middle of the de Campos poem, “Maritime Ode.”

The short lecture
Tabucchi devotes to The Book of Disquiet is entitled, “L’infinie
dysphorique du Bernardo Soares” (“The Dysphoric Infinity of Bernado Soares”). Tabucchi
views Soares as a being whose primary mode of interacting with the world is a “disquiet”
feeling of nostalgia, not for the
past, or even the present, but for those things that might have been. Soares’ life is unusually marked by
insignificance and troubled by the day-to-day. Out of
the vast and dense universe of the quotidian described in these 450 pages of
meditations by Soares, Tabucchi pulls out a particularly interesting episode:
the fright Soares experiences when a group photo is taken at a holiday party at
his office (fragment 56 in the Richard Zenith translation), a photo that causes
Soares to suffer “the truth on seeing myself there” and that prompts him to
wonder who he is, exactly, among this “lifeless tide of faces.” In effect, it’s
a scene that clearly identifies Soares as depressive and dysphoric. And while
as Tabucchi points out, the origins of this depression beg for a psychoanalytic
interpretation he’s unqualified to provide, one must also point out that Soares
is a fictional character, his book a “phenomenological” one (with a kinship to
Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Soares’ depression is
not just the “black mood” of the ancients, but a dysphoric rupture with
reality, a frustration with not being able to find in the exterior world a correlation
for the grandeur of his emotions and sensations, those great and small alike. His
interior world is simply too expansive to fit the crude limitations of his
commonplace reality. A commonplace person, he turns of necessity to “his little
daily universe, his pocket universe,” (I love this phrase – “pocket universe”), the
ordinariness of the world, constructing of it a new kind of infinity, a new
kind of metaphysics through which the mysteries of the universe are revealed
via the quotidian and banal. One result of this attempt to invest the outside,
commonplace world with the tumultuous interior world of Soares’ emotions is the
richness with which, in his daily journal, Soares is able to imbue the most
insignificant of things and magnify the world through them (through
descriptions Tabucchi compares to the “word-paintings” of Ruskin). As Tabucchi concludes, Soares’ writing –
his pinning down the impressions of a day and etching his reflections on his
tenuous existence – is the dysphoric stroke of a pendulum that finds a
correlating euphoric expression in Pessoa’s other poet heteronyms, together representing an almost compulsory
attempt to fill the void by trying to write “all possible books…incessantly
multiplying oneself as though the world were made of writing.”

“…as though the world were made of writing.”

I look forward to
tracking down Tabucchi’s other book of essays on Pessoa.

Friday, April 20, 2012

To open Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet is get a glimpse of still, twilit infinity. This
surprisingly rich, dense, lyrical work defies classification, interpretation
and conclusions. At once novel, journal, poem (or “poeticized prose,” as
translator Richard Zenith calls it), meditation, confession, psychological case
study (from the patient’s point of view), philosophical essay, and description
of the abyss, The Book of Disquiet may well be one of the world’s most
accurately titled works of art.

It also may well be one
of the world’s most amorphous documents, a book only in the loosest sense. Its
history reads like the contrived conceit of some contemporary metafictional
novel: found at Pessoa’s death in 1935 as a collection of bound and loose pages
in a trunk, The Book of Disquiet, from its indeterminate plan as to how its
parts were to fit together, and as to what should and shouldn’t be included,
retains an indefinite, shifting shape.

The indistinct outlines
of its form provide us this: close to five hundred entries in a kind of log in
which the impressions of Bernando Soares, an accounting clerk in an
import/export office in the Rua Douradores in Lisbon (the city that gave birth
to the sublime) are recorded with a repetitive layering, the day by day
accounts of a solitary, depressive yet poetic functionary who goes each day to
his office, performs his duty, dines at the same restaurant each evening, and walks
home through Lisbon’s streets to his spare, humble apartment where he puts down
his observations and reflections. If a more communicative Bartleby or a less bitter
and incapacitated Willy Loman had kept a journal, it might read a little like
this; a devotional exercise in capturing tedium, routine, and the mechanical,
paralyzed life of an office worker.

Amateur Reader at
Wuthering Expectations hosted something ofa solo read-along of The Book of Disquieta couple of weeks ago, pulling the weight himself. In joining this late, I can add
little to the insights provided by his posts and in the accompanying comments, but
among the latter one reader called The Book of Disquiet “frightening,”
while another called it “comfort reading.” I can’t know what’s behind those readers’ disparate poles of
reaction, but since I’ve experienced both of them myself, I’ll argue in favor
of discarding an understandable reluctance to begin this admittedly frightening
prospect - a 450 page book in which melancholy, insomnia, and passive crises of
identity repeat across the entirety of its surface – and even finding solace in
it.

I’d flirted with picking
up a copy of The Book of Disquiet for many years, repeatedly passing it
over out of anxiety that it would prove a dreary, melancholic cult novel
attractive primarily to dreary, melancholic, cultish intellectuals. The first
pages of The Book of Disquiet, however, made me sit up straight. Its
immediate, prescient articulation of modern anxieties and sentiments felt intimately,
eerily, abruptly familiar, yet for all that seemed fresh and illuminating. Pessoa’s
language surprised me even more; in describing a world of the banal and ordinary,
of office work and simple rooms, of passivity and resignation, Bernardo Soares’
gaze is also charged with an intense, ravishing lyricism and a Whitmanian,
biblical cadence. Some passages in the The Book of Disquiet are simply
breathtaking, lending a subversive irony and an intensity of observed life to
the narrator’s meditations on futility.

Soares is a
quintessential modern man, yoked to a workday that repeats itself with no
promise of respite “until the coach from the abyss pulls up” (Zenith, fragment
1). In some ways he’s the flip side of a Kafka character; both are at the mercy
of bureaucratic, impersonal forces larger than themselves, but Soares, rather
than being reduced to the iconic singularity of a dry and dusty beetle, a
badger in a burrow or a hunger artist in a cage, finds, if not escape exactly,
then perhaps a kind of allowance for continuing to live, gained through the
unexpected fruits of his concentrated attempts to melt into his surroundings,
to extinguish himself to the point of refusing an identity, to seek refuge in
nothingness. Like Whitman (whose influence pervades The Book of Disquiet)
Soares, in his naked confrontation with the world and panoramic, encompassing,
personified identification with all that his attention touches, contains
multitudes. Unlike Whitman, whatever celebration of himself he makes is sober and
interior, whatever singing of it but a wistful fado. Pessoa has taken the
ebullient, expansive infinity of Whitman and seated it in 9-to-5 office job. In
place of a desire to merge atomically with the world in a joyous fusion, there’s
an almost pathological compulsion in Soares to obliterate himself in the world.
In large measure he succeeds, sensing himself only as a concentrated awareness,
a disembodied eye that observes, an existence reduced to a presence that
dreams, with an effacing, disconsolate kind of freedom snatched from trying to
avoid being seen. Dreams trump
reality in The Book of Disquiet, providing a kind of parallel shadow
life for Soares to inhabit, one multiplied by dreams’ capacity - like that of
fiction, one might add - to allow one to lead, in the world of the mind, a
multiplicity of lives other than one’s own (tellingly, Soares dreams of a
romanticized Samarkand of the past, an exotic and impossible destination that
might as well be the back of the moon).
Even dreams, though, as Soares recognizes, have “detestable”
limitations, since the mind recognizes that they are but dreams. Yet neither is
action possible, in that action “offends… sensibility” and threatens to disrupt
– as though sicklied over with the pale cast of thought - the still gaze that provides
Soares the poetic response that sustains him. And so Soares remains something
of a fixed quantity, a gaze that thinks, slotted somewhere between dreaming and
action, between emotion and intellect, flickering but not really moving, a
figure in a zoetrope.

What could be comforting
in this? Routine can provide comfort. Inaction can provide a kind of
tranquility. But a serious person would hardly think of these as more than
illusory. What may be comforting, however, in a philosophical sense, is Soares’
acceptance of the price of routine and inaction, one articulated here as
disquiet, or in the original Portuguese, desassossego
(a word deconstructed by Antonio Tabucchi in a brief essay on the book[i],
as being, like its sister word saudade,
nearly untranslatable in its complexity of associations). Soares provides the
kind of comfort one obtains from having one’s sense of reality affirmed, from accepting
intranquility as a condition of modern life. In other words, Soares provides
the solace of understanding that he does not understand.

One might also find
comfort in the aphoristic quality of Soares’ journal. Much of The Book of
Disquiet consists of meditations, aphorisms that, even in their disquieting
assertions, provide a lulling affirmation of one’s existence. Despite Soares’
determined conviction that action is futile, that the refuge of dreams is
temporary, that thought is of questionable use, there remains a palpable
heroism not only in the poeticism of his response to the world, but in the very
fact that he has one. Perhaps most striking about The Book of Disquiet
is the manner in which Pessoa merges these meditations on routine existence
with a rapturous poeticism that lifts Soares far above his ordinary, day to day
life; it’s no coincidence that so many of Soares’ descriptions involve the sky
above Lisbon. Pessoa/Soares provides us, as Tabucchi points out in his essay, a
metaphysics of the banal. It’s the closest thing we may have to a religious
text for the faithless and dispossessed.

The one activity in
which Soares engages that may be construed as action (apart those minimal
functional tasks required to dress and eat and hold a job) is writing. In this
dense, amorphous collection of what at times appears to be little other than entries
one might shuffle like a deck of cards (one kind of infinity), perhaps the
beginning of The Book of Disquiet is really the end. Here one finds a
short framing device through which Fernando Pessoa first introduces us to Bernando
Soares, a man (like himself) who dines each night (like himself) at the same
restaurant and who (like himself) retires each night to a simple room to
write: a semblable, an intimate if not exactly a friend. At the end of this
preface, Pessoa notes Soares’ contentment in finding someone with whom to leave
his book, a gift Pessoa accepts with an appreciation “from a psychological
point of view” and because he recognizes the writer’s need to have a reader. For
those of us now privileged to be readers of The Book of Disquiet, we may
recognize our own semblable in Pessoa’s
book, which speaks so intimately to the many attributes of our own modern
psychology, and which, by being a work of fiction and not simply a
psychological case study, immortalizes, in an almost infinitely intriguing work
of art (I have scarcely begun to sound its depths), the heroic/anti-heroic
fragility of our dreaming, shifting, insubstantial search for meaning, solidity
and identity in a mechanized and spiritually tenuous world.

One final note on
reading The Book of Disquiet to help mitigate the fright of anyone
approaching it for the first time, particularly those who, like me, expected a
novel. While the book has novelistic aspects, its dense accumulation of
observations and reflections can weigh heavily in one’s reading, and it has
little if anything in the way of plot (unless one might approach Pessoa’s coyly
expressed “psychological point of view” with a psychologist’s interest in
tracing Soares’ pathology). In a comment, Amateur Reader notes translator Alfred
MacAdams’ suggestion to approach the book by reading it through once in the
already somewhat arbitrary order in which it has been assembled, then turning
to its entries randomly for the rest of one’s life. This seems infinitely sound advice.